Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
Feel  Jun 2015
how terrifying
Feel Jun 2015
How terrifying,
a boat ashore,
waiting to take us,
away from war.

How terrifying,
we want to be,
taken away,
far into the sea.

How terrifying,
the ocean parts,
submerging knees,
and drowning hearts.

How terrifying,
the river starts,
pebbles hop,
for yards and yards.

How terrifying,
the boat fights,
the loneliest of dawn,
the darkest of night.

How terrifying,
in the midst of this,
my heart crushed
into tiny little bits.

How terrifying,
fear consumed bliss,
as I lean over,
for one more kiss.

How terrifying,
my eyes torn,
to finally find,
you indefinitely gone.
Have you killed with an apple
have you destroyed with a corer
could you deem to be a true warrior
that's the terrifying reality of war

Would you and could you do the numbers
to claim another bar on your ginger beer lapel
do you think you could in any light year
know the terrifying reality of war

Please I would like to sign your name
here you, ***** blood on the dotted line
come on you mothers of ******
see the true terrifying reality of war

Have you been involved in friendly fire
would captivity be your desire
then be a hero to settle a score
as that is the terrifying reality of war

I am ready, and I wonder if are you
or with your kin, hide in old husband's shoes
know where I go is rather *******
this truly is the terrifying reality of war


By Christos Andreas Kourtis aka NeonSolaris
By NeonSolaris

© 2013 NeonSolaris (All rights reserved)
B M Clark  May 2014
Untitled
B M Clark May 2014
The moon smiles down on me
Stars winking with a unique light
The wind dances with my hair
And I feel alive again

My voice rises on the wind
I let the laughter in, as I dance around
Feeling so unlike me, and in the sound
I feel like I can live here forever

The up and down roller-coaster
It's loving every second you have
It's terrifying, exhilarating, intoxicating
It's the thrilling ride of life

It's like living a dream
It's like the sun shines just for me
It's terrifying, exhilarating, intoxicating
It's the thrilling ride of life

It's been so long since I've felt like this
I've been beat when I'm down
I feel like I've been pushed around too long
And I finally stopped taking the crap

I stood up, I'll shout out
Nothing you say can keep me down
You're not welcome anymore
If all you do is tell me where I fall short

I was passive, I was meek
I used to take all the crap
I never let my hurt show
I'm taking charge to let you know

I'm not that girl anymore
I'm finally finding me
She's strong, and unafraid
And I'm not going back to who I used to be
Because I love me.

The up and down roller-coaster
It's loving every second you have
It's terrifying, exhilarating, intoxicating
It's the thrilling ride of life

It's like living a dream
It's like the sun shines just for me
It's terrifying, exhilarating, intoxicating
It's the thrilling ride of life

And now that I've finally found me
I hope that you can hold on to her
Because if you can't she'll be gone
And after all this I hope you see

I'm me, and I love it
It's time that I show it
I love, and I know it
It's everything I ever want to be

And if you don't like me
Then go find someone new
This girl sure don't need you
I hope that's something you see

The up and down roller-coaster
It's loving every second you have
It's terrifying, exhilarating, intoxicating
It's the thrilling ride of life

It's like living a dream
It's like the sun shines just for me
It's terrifying, exhilarating, intoxicating
It's the thrilling ride of life

And the ride will move on
With or with you there
Because I'm me
priscillaislove Apr 2015
When a piece of the mind becomes attached to that part of our body,
It is a terrifying thing.
To long in your heart for the ******* time of your life,
Is a terrifying lust.
To have to tell yourself,
You deserve more than that....

And yet not care because all you can feel is the absence of the Flames,
Not yet dancing on the tip of your tongue.

It is a terrifying thing.
effy May 2015
"My mouth hasn't shut up about you since you kissed it. The idea that you may kiss it again is stuck in my brain, which hasn't stopped thinking about you since, well, before any kiss. And now the prospect of those kisses seems to wind me like when you slip on the stairs and one of the steps hits you in the middle of the back. The notion of them continuing for what is traditionally terrifying forever excites me to an unfamiliar degree."
Megan Grace Sep 2012
Your name is the loveliest word
I've ever said. In my life
I've never known someone like you.
Your aura is a quilt
that I could spend all day in
if you'd let me.
I think the chances of me meeting
another you are absurd
and I find the whole idea
to be terrifying.
I could make so much room
for you in my heart.
In the digital l-and
We l-ive in
Mistakenly automatic
One pointing at a chest of tools
Eyes on i
No soul can tell a part a weakling metal


Robots robbing robbers rich
T-error terrifying t-errorists
Artist gods and goddesses
Sharing platform to unleashed gifts


Mint hue bubbles squeak
Fizzy dizzy violet haze
World head to toes spins
Any day it spins coins in change


A quiet girl is sinister
Siren of mystery or future
Robot is your mirror
Peach chin with teeth filter
No innocence and glitter litter
Guilty until proven the latter


A quiet girl a terrorist
Error mouths terror twist
Terrorist from the orient
They hide in between every end
Disguises they cover in
Racist as problem solving


Smile girl watch
A fake smile and eyes
Skin of steel so is her
Heart made alloy
How it blazes to the touch when heated
Oh it bites fingertips as it's cold
Hair resting on the curve of her spine
A woman's hair only breaks if it tries to grow


What she said
Tell me if you can tell us a part
Warning tears borne from her crooked eyes
Robot and soul
Terrorists from t-errorists
No soul knows either
Tattoos or memory shall identify you
© Teri Darlene Basallote Yeo
Ted Hughes  Sep 2009
Thrushes
Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn,
More coiled steel than living - a poised
Dark deadly eye, those delicate legs
Triggered to stirrings beyond sense - with a start, a bounce,
a stab
Overtake the instant and drag out some writhing thing.
No indolent procrastinations and no yawning states,
No sighs or head-scratchings. Nothing but bounce and stab
And a ravening second.

Is it their single-mind-sized skulls, or a trained
Body, or genius, or a nestful of brats
Gives their days this bullet and automatic
Purpose? Mozart's brain had it, and the shark's mouth
That hungers down the blood-smell even to a leak of its own
Side and devouring of itself: efficiency which
Strikes too streamlined for any doubt to pluck at it
Or obstruction deflect.

With a man it is otherwise. Heroisms on horseback,
Outstripping his desk-diary at a broad desk,
Carving at a tiny ivory ornament
For years: his act worships itself - while for him,
Though he bends to be blent in the prayer, how loud and
above what
Furious spaces of fire do the distracting devils
**** and hosannah, under what wilderness
Of black silent waters weep.
It's ******* terrifying
Like one half of your brain is tearing away from the other
Nothing is in your control anymore
Scream, cry, ******* kick a wall
It's always the same
Not knowing which way you're gonna fall
When you can't make up your mind
And its one or the other but you can't pick
YOU WONT
Because it's not something you can do
The most BASIC decisions you will make in a day
Are the hardest decisions you'll ever overthink
Everything.... Is too much
We're all psychos
We are all beyond help
Because we are an anxiety, depression trodden society
And it all comes down to the unknown
And that's ******* terrifying
Michael R Burch Feb 2020
Komm, Du (“Come, You”)
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

This was Rilke’s last poem, written ten days before his death. He died open-eyed in the arms of his doctor on December 29, 1926, in the Valmont Sanatorium, of leukemia and its complications. I had a friend who died of leukemia and he was burning up with fever in the end. I believe that is what Rilke was describing here: he was literally burning alive.

Come, you—the last one I acknowledge; return—
incurable pain searing this physical mesh.
As I burned in the spirit once, so now I burn
with you; meanwhile, you consume my flesh.

This wood that long resisted your embrace
now nourishes you; I surrender to your fury
as my gentleness mutates to hellish rage—
uncaged, wild, primal, mindless, outré.

Completely free, no longer future’s pawn,
I clambered up this crazy pyre of pain,
certain I’d never return—my heart’s reserves gone—
to become death’s nameless victim, purged by flame.

Now all I ever was must be denied.
I left my memories of my past elsewhere.
That life—my former life—remains outside.
Inside, I’m lost. Nobody knows me here.

English translation originally published by Better Than Starbucks

Original text:

Komm du

Komm du, du letzter, den ich anerkenne,
heilloser Schmerz im leiblichen Geweb:
wie ich im Geiste brannte, sieh, ich brenne
in dir; das Holz hat lange widerstrebt,
der Flamme, die du loderst, zuzustimmen,
nun aber nähr’ ich dich und brenn in dir.
Mein hiesig Mildsein wird in deinem Grimmen
ein Grimm der Hölle nicht von hier.
Ganz rein, ganz planlos frei von Zukunft stieg
ich auf des Leidens wirren Scheiterhaufen,
so sicher nirgend Künftiges zu kaufen
um dieses Herz, darin der Vorrat schwieg.
Bin ich es noch, der da unkenntlich brennt?
Erinnerungen reiß ich nicht herein.
O Leben, Leben: Draußensein.
Und ich in Lohe. Niemand der mich kennt.

Keywords/Tags: German, translation, Rilke, last poem, death, fever, burning, pyre, leukemia, pain, consumed, consummation, flesh, spirit, rage, pawn, free, purge, purged, inside, outside, lost, unknown, alienated, alienation



This is my translation of the first of Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Rilke began the first Duino Elegy in 1912, as a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, at Duino Castle, near Trieste on the Adriatic Sea.

First Elegy
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Who, if I objected, would hear me among the angelic orders?
For if the least One pressed me intimately against its breast,
I would be lost in its infinite Immensity!
Because beauty, which we mortals can barely endure, is the beginning of terror;
we stand awed when it benignly declines to annihilate us.
Every Angel is terrifying!

And so I restrain myself, swallowing the sound of my pitiful sobbing.
For whom may we turn to, in our desire?
Not to Angels, nor to men, and already the sentient animals are aware
that we are all aliens in this metaphorical existence.
Perhaps some tree still stands on a hillside, which we can study with our ordinary vision.
Perhaps the commonplace street still remains amid man’s fealty to materiality—
the concrete items that never destabilize.
Oh, and of course there is the night: her dark currents caress our faces ...

But whom, then, do we live for?
That longed-for but mildly disappointing presence the lonely heart so desperately desires?
Is life any less difficult for lovers?
They only use each other to avoid their appointed fates!
How can you fail to comprehend?
Fling your arms’ emptiness into this space we occupy and inhale:
may birds fill the expanded air with more intimate flying!

Yes, the springtime still requires you.
Perpetually a star waits for you to recognize it.
A wave recedes toward you from the distant past,
or as you walk beneath an open window, a violin yields virginally to your ears.
All this was preordained. But how can you incorporate it? ...
Weren't you always distracted by expectations, as if every event presaged some new beloved?
(Where can you harbor, when all these enormous strange thoughts surging within you keep
you up all night, restlessly rising and falling?)

When you are full of yearning, sing of loving women, because their passions are finite;
sing of forsaken women (and how you almost envy them)
because they could love you more purely than the ones you left gratified.

Resume the unattainable exaltation; remember: the hero survives;
even his demise was merely a stepping stone toward his latest rebirth.

But spent and exhausted Nature withdraws lovers back into herself,
as if lacking the energy to recreate them.
Have you remembered Gaspara Stampa with sufficient focus—
how any abandoned girl might be inspired by her fierce example
and might ask herself, "How can I be like her?"

Shouldn't these ancient sufferings become fruitful for us?

Shouldn’t we free ourselves from the beloved,
quivering, as the arrow endures the bowstring's tension,
so that in the snap of release it soars beyond itself?
For there is nowhere else where we can remain.

Voices! Voices!

Listen, heart, as levitating saints once listened,
until the elevating call soared them heavenward;
and yet they continued kneeling, unaware, so complete was their concentration.

Not that you could endure God's voice—far from it!

But heed the wind’s voice and the ceaseless formless message of silence:
It murmurs now of the martyred young.

Whenever you attended a church in Naples or Rome,
didn't they come quietly to address you?
And didn’t an exalted inscription impress its mission upon you
recently, on the plaque in Santa Maria Formosa?
What they require of me is that I gently remove any appearance of injustice—
which at times slightly hinders their souls from advancing.

Of course, it is endlessly strange to no longer inhabit the earth;
to relinquish customs one barely had the time to acquire;
not to see in roses and other tokens a hopeful human future;
no longer to be oneself, cradled in infinitely caring hands;
to set aside even one's own name,
forgotten as easily as a child’s broken plaything.

How strange to no longer desire one's desires!
How strange to see meanings no longer cohere, drifting off into space.
Dying is difficult and requires retrieval before one can gradually decipher eternity.

The living all err in believing the too-sharp distinctions they create themselves.

Angels (men say) don't know whether they move among the living or the dead.
The eternal current merges all ages in its maelstrom
until the voices of both realms are drowned out in its thunderous roar.

In the end, the early-departed no longer need us:
they are weaned gently from earth's agonies and ecstasies,
as children outgrow their mothers’ *******.

But we, who need such immense mysteries,
and for whom grief is so often the source of our spirit's progress—
how can we exist without them?

Is the legend of the lament for Linos meaningless—
the daring first notes of the song pierce our apathy;
then, in the interlude, when the youth, lovely as a god, has suddenly departed forever,
we experience the emptiness of the Void for the first time—
that harmony which now enraptures and comforts and aids us?



Second Elegy
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Every angel is terrifying. And yet, alas, I invoke you,
one of the soul’s lethal raptors, well aware of your nature.
As in the days of Tobias, when one of you, obscuring his radiance,
stood at the simple threshold, appearing ordinary rather than appalling
while the curious youth peered through the window.
But if the Archangel emerged today, perilous, from beyond the stars
and took even one step toward us, our hammering hearts
would pound us to death. What are you?

Who are you? Joyous from the beginning;
God’s early successes; Creation’s favorites;
creatures of the heights; pollen of the flowering godhead; cusps of pure light;
stately corridors; rising stairways; exalted thrones;
filling space with your pure essence; crests of rapture;
shields of ecstasy; storms of tumultuous emotions whipped into whirlwinds ...
until one, acting alone, recreates itself by mirroring the beauty of its own countenance.

While we, when deeply moved, evaporate;
we exhale ourselves and fade away, growing faint like smoldering embers;
we drift away like the scent of smoke.
And while someone might say: “You’re in my blood! You occupy this room!
You fill this entire springtime!” ... Still, what becomes of us?
We cannot be contained; we vanish whether inside or out.
And even the loveliest, who can retain them?

Resemblance ceaselessly rises, then is gone, like dew from dawn’s grasses.
And what is ours drifts away, like warmth from a steaming dish.
O smile, where are you bound?
O heavenward glance: are you a receding heat wave, a ripple of the heart?
Alas, but is this not what we are?
Does the cosmos we dissolve into savor us?
Do the angels reabsorb only the radiance they emitted themselves,
or sometimes, perhaps by oversight, traces of our being as well?
Are we included in their features, as obscure as the vague looks on the faces of pregnant women?
Do they notice us at all (how could they) as they reform themselves?

Lovers, if they only knew how, might mutter marvelous curses into the night air.
For it seems everything eludes us.
See: the trees really do exist; our houses stand solid and firm.
And yet we drift away, like weightless sighs.
And all creation conspires to remain silent about us: perhaps from shame, perhaps from inexpressible hope?

Lovers, gratified by each other, I ask to you consider:
You cling to each other, but where is your proof of a connection?
Sometimes my hands become aware of each other
and my time-worn, exhausted face takes shelter in them,
creating a slight sensation.
But because of that, can I still claim to be?

You, the ones who writhe with each other’s passions
until, overwhelmed, someone begs: “No more!...”;
You who swell beneath each other’s hands like autumn grapes;
You, the one who dwindles as the other increases:
I ask you to consider ...
I know you touch each other so ardently because each caress preserves pure continuance,
like the promise of eternity, because the flesh touched does not disappear.
And yet, when you have survived the terror of initial intimacy,
the first lonely vigil at the window, the first walk together through the blossoming garden:
lovers, do you not still remain who you were before?
If you lift your lips to each other’s and unite, potion to potion,
still how strangely each drinker eludes the magic.

Weren’t you confounded by the cautious human gestures on Attic gravestones?
Weren’t love and farewell laid so lightly on shoulders they seemed composed of some ethereal substance unknown to us today?
Consider those hands, how weightlessly they rested, despite the powerful torsos.
The ancient masters knew: “We can only go so far, in touching each other. The gods can exert more force. But that is their affair.”
If only we, too, could discover such a pure, contained Eden for humanity,
our own fruitful strip of soil between river and rock.
For our hearts have always exceeded us, as our ancestors’ did.
And we can no longer trust our own eyes, when gazing at godlike bodies, our hearts find a greater repose.



Keywords/Tags: Rilke, elegy, elegies, angels, beauty, terror, terrifying, desire, vision, reality, heart, love, lovers, beloved, rose, saints, spirits, souls, ghosts, voices, torso, Apollo, Rodin, panther, autumn, beggar

— The End —